Time in Fiction

What can we learn about the world from engaging with fictional time-series? What should we make of stories involving time travellers who change the past, recurrence of a single day, foreknowledge of the future, the freezing or rewinding of time, or time-series which split into alternative courses of events? Do they show us radical alternative possibilities concerning the nature of time, or do they show that even the impossible can be represented in fiction? Neither, so this book argues. Defending the view that a fiction represents a single possible world, the authors show how apparent representations of radically different time-series can be explained in terms ofhow worlds are represented without there being any fictional world which has such a time-series. In this way, the book uses the complexities of fictional time to get to the core of the relation between truth in fiction and possibility. It provides a logic and metaphysics to deal with the fact that fictions can leave certain features of their fictional worlds indefinite, and draws comparisons and connections between fictional and scientific representations and hypotheses. Utilising the notion of a counterpart, the authors show how to understand claims concerning persistence of characters and their identity across fictions, and what it means for a fiction to be 'set' at an actual time. Consideration is given to motion in fiction, asking whether it is sometimes continuous and sometimes discrete, how to understand different rates of change, and whether fictional time itself can be said to flow.

Craig Bourne, University of Hertfordshire,Emily Caddick Bourne, University of Cambridge

Craig Bourne is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire. Craig studied Philosophy at Pembroke College, Cambridge, taking a BA (1995-1998), MPhil (1998-1999), and PhD (1999-2002). He was a Research Fellow at St Catharine's College, Cambridge (2002-2006), Lecturer in the Cambridge Philosophy Faculty (2004-2005), and College Lecturer in Philosophy at Pembroke and New Hall, Cambridge (2006-2007). He is author ofA Future for Presentism (OUP, 2006) and is currently co-editing a collection (with Emily Caddick Bourne) on Shakespeare and philosophy.

Emily Caddick Bourne is Academic Director and Teaching Officer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. Emily completed her BA (2004-2007), MPhil (2007-2008), and PhD (2008-2011) in Philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. Emily was, from 2011-2014, a Jacobsen Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, based in the Institute of Philosophy. Emily is currently co-editing a collection (with Craig Bourne) on Shakespeare and philosophy.